What is a Good Life? #82
Exploring True Health with Parneet Pal
On the 82nd episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Parneet Pal, MBBS, MS. Parneet is a Harvard- and Columbia-trained physician-educator who teaches skills and communicates ideas that advance personal, workplace, and planetary health. She is the founder of Systematically Well Advisory Inc., where she applies her expertise to enhance health and performance and their impact on business leadership. Her goal is to make you fall in love with your biology so that it works for you, your work, and the planet. She works with business teams and global organisations to address workplace stress, burnout, loneliness, and sustainability.
Parneet speaks at global conferences such as Web Summit and TED Countdown and guest lectures at several universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. She has been a TEDMED scholar, a Harvard Business Review contributor, and has been featured on the cover of Mindful magazine.
In this enlightening conversation, Parneet shares her explorations around what true health is, moving away from siloed approaches to well-being to consider social, economic, ecological, and environmental factors. She shares remarkable insights from what our biology suggests a good life is, as well as major realisations she has made in her own life in relation to nature, community, mindfulness, and compassion.
This whole conversation is full of life-affirming messages around the wonder, design, and miracle of life. Parneet is an absolute fountain of knowledge and embodied compassion, and this episode will fill you with gratitude to simply exist in this world and for the very life we live.
The weekly clip from the podcast (5 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (60 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
In this interview, there were moments I found incredibly life-affirming in what Parneet shared. None more so than in the clip above, where she cites research highlighting the effects of a hedonic (focused on pleasure) and eudaimonic (more meaningful) lifestyle on the levels of inflammation in our cells.
The research suggests that a life of meaning, community, and mutual care lowers the level of inflammation in cells. Even in circumstances where participants experienced less comfort or pleasure and more challenges, their cells rewarded this approach to life with higher immunity, lower inflammation, and greater longevity.
Parneet concluded that the way our biology is designed shows us how we need to live our lives and that our biology rewards us when we take care of each other.
It makes me wonder about our atomised modern lives, what we value, who we put on magazine covers, and how we got here.
Whether I look to ancient spiritual texts, psychology studies, biology, etc., they all seem to point to the same thing: a connected life, one with community, where we give, share, and support one another, is how we thrive.
What’s more, we all know it anecdotally. When I help others, that energy or feeling seems to live within me whenever I reflect on the moment. If you think about any time you went out of your way to serve another and compare that memory and energy with the memory of getting the latest iPhone or gadget, how do they compare?
I wonder what stands in our way?
Is it fear that we’ll have less than others? That we’ll fall behind? That others may take advantage of our kindness? The correlation we see between our self-worth and our net worth?
Is it the intense levels of comparison in our societies, the competition we create amongst ourselves?
Is it the synthetic desire that advertising, media, and constant messaging create within us, targeting our fears and insecurities, and creating a sense of scarcity? Meanwhile, the things that truly matter in our lives are discounted, and we fail to see the natural abundance of what is important.
Have you ever worried for a second that you might run out of love for your child or whoever you hold dearest? Does love feel like something scarce within you?
I am not discounting the importance of having security, food, etc. But for those of us who don’t live with food insecurity and worries around actual survival, whose bigger stresses come from wanting more luxury—the extension to the house, the new kitchen, the new car, or the nicer holiday—
I wonder at what point the penny drops that the hedonic and atomised lifestyle we are glorifying and pursuing may be the very thing that stands between us and our own good life.
Whether we look at our physical, mental, or spiritual well-being, and consider the trends in mental health, chronic inflammation conditions, etc., the signs are becoming clearer and clearer that it isn’t working for us.
Perhaps like many of our individual journeys, where the suffering became great enough to the point that we sought therapy, mindfulness, connection, etc., where it was unavoidably in our best interests to face the pain we were avoiding, perhaps this moment is coming for us collectively to realise what we are pursuing, valuing, and fighting for no longer serves us and we must find a new way.
Our propensity to adapt as a result of our suffering is what keeps me perpetually optimistic about human beings. It is often what sparks the desire to come home once more after we have once again lost our way.
3. Full Episode - Exploring True Health with Parneet Pal - What is a Good Life? #82
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4. This week’s Questions
Do you consider your body a part of or separate to nature?
What relationships in your life do you suspect either increase or decrease inflammation in your body?
About Me
I am a coach and writer based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me to explore your own lines of self-inquiry, experiences I create to stimulate more meaningful group conversations, trust, and connection, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.